Call Hamid Karzai's Bluff

Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute

The ever-mercurial Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, recently called a council of the nation's tribal elders (a loya jirga) to ratify a bilateral security agreement reached with
the United States governing the up to 12,000 U.S. forces that would be
left in that country after the withdrawal of all American and
international combat forces at the end of 2014. Then Karzai promptly
defied his own conclave by ignoring its recommendation to sign the
agreement quickly; he insisted that he would sign it only in the spring of 2014.
He then added more conditions, namely that the United States free
Afghan prisoners held at the prison in Guantanamo and halt all U.S.
military raids on Afghan homes.

The bilateral agreement itself says that the United States can raid
Afghan dwellings only in extraordinary circumstances. Completely ending
such raids would severely impede one of the primary missions in
Afghanistan for the residual U.S. forces -- hunting any remaining al
Qaeda terrorists. Because Karzai really cares little about this
mission, he is perfectly willing to demand that it be hampered to score
political points domestically with an Afghan population that is sick of
both the practice and foreign occupation. He originally made this
concession to the United States only to get U.S. troops to continue
training Afghan forces and to retain the billions in foreign aid that
comes with that effort.

From his first campaign for president, Barack Obama promised to end
more than decade of war and bring American troops home. Yet he has
since scaled this back to withdrawing "combat" forces, thus allowing him
the loophole of retaining up to 12,000 U.S. forces in the country. Yet Karzai's insistence that all U.S. raids on Afghan
homes by such residual forces be stopped shows that Obama has simply
redefined the word "combat." Counterterrorism missions do involve
extreme danger and shooting people -- combat in the thinking of any
layman. U.S. military forces training Afghan forces in the field can
also be involved in what anyone would recognize as combat, especially if
they come under enemy fire. So in reality, by leaving any U.S. forces
in Afghanistan, Obama is really breaking his promise to the American
people to remove all combat forces by the end of 2014.

But are these residual forces really needed for U.S. security?
Hardly. Even U.S. intelligence believes only a small number of al Qaeda
operatives remain in Afghanistan. If the United States needed to kill
them, it could simply do so with airstrikes or drone attacks from
outside the country. The real reasons for the continuing presence of
U.S. forces is to keep training the wobbly Afghan security forces and
act as a political symbol of continued American commitment to the Afghan
government's survival. Since a 12-year, $43 million "train and equip" mission by a larger U.S. force has not resulted in
competent Afghan security forces, it is doubtful that a smaller residual
American force can effect the same. In other words, the main reason
the troops are being left appears to be that if the United States left
completely, psychologically the Afghan regime would collapse and civil
war would resume. Newsflash: That outcome may happen even if the
United States keeps a residual force in the country, only resulting in
more needless American deaths.

At any rate, given those dire circumstances, one would think that
Karzai would be pandering to the Americans to get them to stay rather
than milking them for every possible concession. However, Karzai knows
how Americans think. Unfortunately, he knows that in the past, they
have behaved imperially, rarely leaving anywhere they have occupied,
because they foolishly believe their security depends on remaining in
far-flung places around the globe to conduct nation-building missions.
So he brazenly makes more demands of the United States, even while his
government's future is tenuous without -- and maybe even with --
residual American forces and aid.

The Obama administration should abandon the American imperial way of
thinking and use Karzai's escalating demands -- and refusal to sign the
bilateral agreement until next spring -- to call his bluff and
withdrawal American forces completely from Afghanistan. The United
States doesn't need troops on the ground in the country to prevent any
return by al Qaeda, taking advantage of the return of chaos, but only to
warn the Afghan Taliban not to harbor such people or American air power
will return to pummel the country from the air. That threat is
credible and should deter a Taliban that likely has learned its lesson
from sheltering such unwanted visitors the last time around.